federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against Fox News by the parents of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, finding that the suit did not meet the legal requirements to proceed.

Joel and Mary Rich sued the network in March, accusing it of fabricating a story that accused their son of conspiring with WikiLeaks. The suit alleged intentional infliction of emotional distress, interference with a contract, and negligent supervision.

In his ruling Thursday, Judge George Daniels found that the complaint failed to satisfy the elements required under federal law.

“It is understandable that Plaintiffs might feel that their grief and personal loss were taken advantage of, and that the tragic death of their son was exploited for political purposes,” Daniels wrote. “However, a general allegation that Defendants had an ‘agreement to collaborate against’ Plaintiffs cannot form the basis of an IIED claim. … Plaintiffs’ complaint is dismissed in its entirety.”

Tim Canova’s fortunes have changed dramatically, for the worse, in the past two years.

The congressional candidate was generating a gusher of campaign contributions in 2016 for his effort to unseat U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston. This year, Canova’s contributions have slowed to a trickle.

How stark is the difference? On June 30, Canova’s campaign reported just $9,010 cash in its bank account.

On the same date two years ago, Canova had more than 100 times as much cash on hand: $986,345.

(Reuters) - Former New York State Senate majority leader Dean Skelos was found guilty of soliciting bribes and other federal corruption charges by a jury on Tuesday, nearly a year after an appeals court threw out an earlier conviction.

The federal jury in Manhattan also convicted Skelos' son, Adam. Both men were found guilty of all the charges they faced, which in addition to soliciting bribes included extortion and conspiracy to commit honest services fraud.

Lawyers for the two men declined to comment after the verdict was announced. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, who presided over the trial, scheduled sentencing for Oct. 24.

Prosecutors accused the elder Skelos, a Republican from Long Island, of using his position to pressure three companies to provide his son with consulting work, a "no-show" job and a $20,000 payment.

Money that Jill Stein raised to recount votes in 2016 swing states is being used by her campaign to pay for legal bills stemming from the investigation of Russian interference in the last presidential election.

In June, The Daily Beast reported that the the U.S. Green Party candidate’s campaign, which raised $7.3 million for recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, had in 2017 stopped disclosing its monthly spending with the Federal Election Commission. Later that month, the Jill Stein for President committee filed a slew of reports that reveal spending on lawyers who are not trying to get inside any voting machines.

At the end of May 2018, according to the most recent FEC filing, the Stein campaign paid the “Partnership for Civil Justice” $66,441.60; that is on top of a $31,536 payment made in January, and more than the Stein campaign had in cash on hand by November 2016.

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than any other race on personal traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday in federal court in Boston by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in a court document laying out the analysis. “Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”

Harvard’s own researchers cited a bias against Asian-American applicants in a series of internal reports in 2013. But Harvard ignored the findings, the court papers said, and never publicly released them.

ALBANY — With exactly three months to go until the Democratic primary for governor, the two-term incumbent, Andrew M. Cuomo, has slightly stretched his sizable lead over his Democratic rival, the actress Cynthia Nixon, according to a new poll.

Mr. Cuomo, 60, holds a 35-point advantage among likely voters over Ms. Nixon — 61-26 percent — according to the Siena College poll released on Wednesday. His lead over the Republican candidate, Marcus J. Molinaro, is narrower: 19 points, 56 to 37 percent, though Mr. Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive, is little known by most voters, the poll found.

Ms. Nixon had trimmed Mr. Cuomo’s lead to 31 points in an April poll by Siena, continuing a steady rise in voter surveys since declaring her candidacy in March. But the last month has seen Mr. Cuomo’s glossy coronation as the party’s preferred candidate at the state convention in late May, forcing Ms. Nixon — making her first run for public office — to begin petitioning to challenge him on the Sept. 13 ballot.

There were some off-putting findings for Mr. Cuomo, including a 44 percent unfavorability rating, a tie for the highest result found by Siena’s pollsters during the governor’s seven-plus years in office. Only 40 percent rank his performance as governor as “excellent” or “good” while 59 percent rate it as “fair” or “poor.”

WASHINGTON
David Richardson, the self-styled progressive Democrat seeking to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, says he stands shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with his campaign staff after they became the first political campaign in Florida to unionize last week.

But there are fewer campaign workers standing with Richardson today. That's because he laid off eight paid campaign employees at the end of a contentious months-long unionization effort.

"David wanted to be able to fire anyone at will and that wasn’t acceptable to us," said Isaiah Ghafoor, who worked as a field organizer for Richardson from March until he was one of eight Richardson staffers laid off two weeks ago. "Two days after a heated bargaining session, seven field organizers were laid off and the finance manager."

Though the unionization effort was ultimately successful, the timing of the layoffs and the Richardson's campaign's argument to staffers that existing Florida labor laws were sufficient enough to protect staffers' rights contrasts with public statements by his campaign that he will "oppose efforts that are anti-union or that weaken the ability to organize and bargain collectively" if elected to Congress.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Jill Stein raised more than $7 million from shell-shocked liberals eager to pursue a swing-state recount. Nearly two years later, the U.S. Green Party’s last candidate for president is still spending that money.

Ongoing litigation, travel costs, and staff salaries are also likely to eat up whatever is left, meaning those who donated to Stein are unlikely to receive a once-promised chance to vote on how the post-recount money would be spent. Nor have donors been given much of a window into how Stein is actually spending their donations.

The last FEC filing from the Stein campaign was for the month of September 2017. And the last update from the campaign itself came in a post on April 20, in which it said it was down to $932,178 in recount funds.

"It is strange that they would just stop filing reports given they were a legitimate, professional campaign, and despite still having more than a million dollars in cash on hand,” Andrew Mayersohn, a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, told The Daily Beast.

Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination in Vermont — but he won’t accept it if he wins.

The famously independent senator, who briefly joined the Democratic Party to run in the 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary only to un-enroll later, officially announced Monday that he would seek a third term in the Senate this fall. He also said that he’ll pull the same maneuver that he did in his 2006 and 2012 Senate races: Running as a Democrat, declining the nomination when he wins and then running as an independent.

The move makes it virtually impossible for another Democrat to seek the party’s nod. And it allows Sanders to loom large in the party primary in August, but still preserve his independence.

But the move also comes at a time when Sanders supporters are pushing for changes to the presidential nominating process as part of the Democratic National Committee unity reform commission. One priority is to open up the party’s primaries to voters who aren’t registered as Democrats.